Sociology, History, and the Problem of Social Change

Extract

In taking for this paper the title “Sociology, History, and the Problem of Social Change,” I am made highly conscious of the fact that, although today I go by the title of sociologist, it was as a student of history twenty-nine years ago that I graduated from this University. It would be scarcely fair to my old history teachers of Saskatchewan to suggest that this evening my past has risen to haunt me. But certainly I learnt too much from George Simpson, Hilda Neatby, and the late Arthur S. Morton for it not to influence what I have to say this evening. Indeed, it was a simple saying of Professor Morton's, made here to apply to sociology, which perhaps best expresses the theme of this paper. The eyes of history, it was his saying, are geography and chronology. Tonight I want to argue that geography and chronology are the eyes of sociology as well as of history and that only by the use of both these eyes can an adequate theory of social change be developed. If, in the course of arguing this, I am led to the conclusion that there cannot continue to exist the kind of distinction now made between history and sociology, I feel confident that my old history teachers of the University of Saskatchewan will not consider that I have been an unfaithful pupil.